The High Times Interview: Jack Herer
by Steven Hager
Jack Herer is the patron saint of the cannabis protest movement. His
landmark study, "The Emporer Wears No Clothes," was the first book to
document the environmental consequences of hemp prohibition. Although
hundreds of thousands of copies of the book were distributed in the mid-80's,
the book went out of print in 1988. Fortunately, a new updated edition has
just been published and it contains some startling new information ton the
role the petrochemical industry played in making hemp illegal.
Taken from High Times magazine, April 1990 issue.
Toll-free number for orders only: 800-435-0715
Transcribed by The Dak - Holiday Inn, Cambodia BBS - 209/456-8584
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High Times: Where were you born?
Jack Herer: In Coney Island Hospital, in Brooklyn, New York, in 1939. My
family moved to Buffalo, New York in 1940 where I was raised. I've lived in
Los Angeles for at least 24 years.
HT: What did your father do?
JH: He managed a collection agency.
HT: When was the first time you smoked marijuana?
JH: In 1969. I was 30 years old and this girl I knew found out I had never
gotten high. Nobody had ever told me about marijuana.
HT: So you were pretty conservative?
JH: I was a normal American nerd. I was in the sign maintenance business.
This girl wanted me to experience something I'd never experienced. She
tried three times to get me high. Finally it worked, and I had the most
incredible sex I'd ever had. My first words after orgasm were: "This is
illegal?" I couldn't believe it.
HT: When did you first become aware of hemp?
JH: In 1973, when i began working on the California Marijuana Initiative
(CMI). The guy who got me involved was called Captain Ed. He convinced me
to donate some of my time to the legalization movement. We made a pact that
we wouldn't stop working for legalization until marijuana was legal, or we
were 84 years old, or we were dead. Captain Ed and his CMI friends
introduced me to all this esoteric information about hemp paper and fiber.
HT: When did you reach the conclusion that legalizing hemp would reverse the
Greenhouse Effect?
JH: About 1979 or 1980, I began to figure out that it was the only thing
that would owrk. You see, the Greenhouse Effect is a direct result of
burning fossil or old carbon fuels. There is only one plant that can
completely substitute for fossil fuel. The plant is an anjnual that grows in
all 50 states. It is the fastest growing sustainable biomass on the planet.
It can produce paper, fiber, food, and fuel. One of the most amazing things
I found was the first issue of High Times, which had an article titled "Hemp
Paper Reconsidered" by Jack Frazier. You should reprint that article.
HT: Good idea.
JH: Then I read Frazier's book, "The Marijuana Farmers," and it just blew me
away. At that time there were only a few people working in the movement who
knew about hemp. Michael Aldridge was one.
HT: Why do you think marijuana was made illegal? Did the oil industry play
a role?
JH: Well, there's new information on this in the updated version of "The
Emporer Wears No Clothes." Based on the current evidence, I believe that
DuPont is either the most criminal corporation in the history of the world,
or the most ignorant. Maybe they're just the luckiest corporation in the
world. Because about 80% of DuPont's business would not exist if hemp was
legal. I base this figure on paint, varnish, plastics, fiber, and from the
sulfide process used to produce wood pulp paper.
HT: Is DuPont primarily an oil company?
JH: No, they are a chemical company. They started out as America's premier
arms company from about 1801 until about 1930. After WWI, DuPont aws awarded
German reparations. Because they lost the war, Germany had to give up all
their patents. DuPont got most of the plastic ones - free. And then in
1935, a DuPont employee invented nylon, a synthetic fiber made from
petrochemicals. The invention was kept a secret until the product was
released in 1938. You see, they couldn't produce nylon at competitive
prices, especially after the invention of a hemp decorticating machine.
There's a great article on the invention of the machine in the February 1938
issue of Popular Mechanics.
HT: I know. We reprinted the article in our February 1989 issue.
JH: It's also in my book. Hemp was going to again become the world's most
important idustrial crop until DuPont got involved. I believe that DuPont
gave secret testimony to Herman Oliphant, chief counsel to the Treasury
Department. In 1935, Oliphant wrote the secret Marijuana Tax Act. The Act
was suddenly submitted to Congress on April 14th, 1937, and railroaded
through. Virtually no one knew that hemp and marijuana were from the same
plant.
HT: Most people still don't know.
JH: The country had only two days notice, and most of the arguments
supporting the bill were blatantly racist. You know, like, black people look
at white women twice after smoking a joint. Some of the most disgusting
words ever uttered came during the evidence given to pass pot prohibition.
You can read the unedited statements in my book.
HT: When did you first start to work on "The Emperor?"
JH: In 1982. I was at a party and I was outlining the whole hemp thing to
Tom Rutherford, a state senator from New Mexico. He said if these facts were
real and if they were put into a book, then pot would be legalized. Some
years earlier I'd realized that the Greenhouse Effect was the result of
buring fossil fuels and cutting down trees. George Bush and William Bennet
are the chief lemmings, leading us to environmental destruction and biocide.
HT: Marijuana certainly isn't illegal because it's dangerous to health.
JH: Not by comparison to other drugs. In fact, marijuana lowers your stress
level and lowers your body temperature. It actually seems that people live
longer if they use it. If you substitute marijuana for tobacco and alcohol,
you'll add eight to 24 years to your life. Now what kind of politician would
ask me to be a lemming for that type of idiocy? You can't make a law that
says I have to die because of someone else's ignorance. I hear the
government came out with some ridiculous new study that nine people found
with tumors on their necks admitted to smoking marijauana. As if there was
some sort of relationship there, when over a quarter of the US population has
smoked pot without getting any neck tumors. This gutter science is typical
of the prohibitionists. Like the ad that ws running on TV last fall. They
supposedly showed the brain waves of a 14 year old becore he smoked
marijuana, and the same brain waves after smoking a joint. Well, the brain
waves after he smoked were almost flat. I knew that wasn't real because the
brain vaves after you smoke marijuana are well known. They're called alpha
waves.
HT: They just totally faked it?
JH: They totally faked it. Listen to what happened. Dr. Donald blum of
UCLA went over to ABC television in Los Angeles and said, "Wait a second,
we've done 10,000 studies on brain waves after you smoke marijuana. They're
alpha waves." When you go into meditation you get a few moments in alpha.
It's your creative side, it's the moment where you let go and the new energy
comes in, and here's the government saying, or at least the government
through the Partnership for a Drug Free America, saying your mind goes dead
when you smoke cannabis.
HT: Who is the main supporter of the Partnership?
JH: Well, as I understand it, the main supporters are beer companies and the
pharmaceutical companies. I'd like them to show me the dead bodies from
marijuana. But they can't because there aren't any. But you can count the
dead bodies from alcohol, tobacco, and legal pharmaceuticals by the millions.
The only dead bodies from marijuana are in the prisons and at the hands of
the police. This is ridiculous.
HT: You never finished the part about the brainwaves. What happened?
JH: After Dr. Blum went to ABC on November 2, 1989, the Media Partnership
for a Drug Free America admitted on November 17th, that they had used the
brain waves of a person in a coma. When asked by ABC reporters why they did
that, they said they felt the effects of marijuana were so dangerous that it
was better to lie to the American public in order to save them, rather than
tell them the truth. When I went off to the army when I was 17 years old, I
believed in America and the rights of freedom. But today I believe my
government is lying to the American people and that my president, George
Bush, is a criminal.
HT: Bush does have very strong ties to the Pharmaceutical industry.
JH: Yeah, after he was the director of the CIA in '76 and '77, he became
director of Lilly, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in America.
Did you know that Dan Quayle's father made him hte director of Lilly in 1977?
I didn't make that connection until last year when I was in Indianapolis.
HT: You mean the Quayle family is tied to pharmaceuticals as well?
JH: They're major stockholders in Lilly and the Indianapolis Star. After
Bush became Vice President in 1981, He went to the IRS to get a huge tax
break for the American pharmaceutical companies operating in Puerto Rico.
That's where they make all the really dangerous junk that's illegal to sell
or produce in the U.S. They dump it on the Third WOrld, like Panama,
Colombia, Peru, El Salvador.
HT: Wasn't Bush reprimanded for arranging that tax break?
JH: Yes, he was. The U.S. Supreme Court ordered him to stop. Our leaders
are acting like lemmings. I want them to legalize hemp and start cleaning up
our planet right now. I don't want to wait 20 or 50 years for something to
be done about petrochemical pollution. And they have to let the people in
jail for drug violations out of prison today! And pay them back for
attorneys, for bail, for losing their jobs and their property! Everything
must be restored!!
[End of Interview]
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